It's Not Just About Length, It's How You Use It!

By Sam Barer

Sound Classics

Size has always been a big issue to me with respect to vehicles. To quote Lemmy from Motorhead: “it’s not how big your pencil is, it’s how you write your name”. And at 6’4”, I’m sick of finding that even big cars and SUVs have insufficient interior space to allow someone to sit behind me without knees or feet in my back.

Seemingly every single time I interact with an automotive media representative or car salesman I’m told how fitting in a specific vehicle will be “no problem”. Sometimes, they’ll even cite interior dimensions statistics, which most automotive journalists will tell you are inherently useless, due to the lack of standards in how they are calculated.

Much to their amazement, when I get in and adjust the seat and tell them to get in and sit behind me, it usually becomes crystal clear that their vehicle (like most cars, trucks and SUVs offered for sale around the globe) is abysmally tight on the inside.

The most egregious example is GM’s Chevy Suburban, GMC Yukon XL, and Cadillac Escalade ESV line. At 224 inches nose-to-tail, the Suburban/XL/ESV are gargantuan behemoths of Jabba the Hut proportions. Even the 130-inch wheelbase is sickeningly long. Still, when I dropped my butt into one two weeks ago and moved the seat back to an appropriate driving position, there wasn’t ample room to put my nearly six-year-old daughter behind me in a booster seat, much less a full-sized adult.

GM has been the gold-standard for big on the outside, small on the inside for over a decade. Due to the cost-cutting nature of the vehicles, interior design has traditionally lacked. Where this has been most apparent is in the sheer girth of the front seats, which have been thicker than the necks on the security guards protecting the stage at OzzFest.

Quite simply, if the seats are thick, that takes away knee, leg and foot room from the person sitting in the next row. I first noticed this back in 1994 with a Cadillac STS, and it has plagued nearly all of GM’s vehicles since. To be fair to GM, though, the Chrysler 300-platform sedans are also serious offenders of the big on the outside, small on the inside, huge through the seat-back problem.

The other size-related issue is that vehicles out there simply aren’t nearly as large as they need to be to fit what they claim they can. The current Toyota Camry is 189-inches long with a 109-inch wheelbase and the Honda Acord is 194/110 and each seats five. The 1977 Buick Le Sabre (the Accord/Camry of its day) in which I spent so many years riding in the back seat to middle and high school was over 200-inches long, but had a 116 inch wheelbase on its way to seating six.

Where this all becomes very interesting is that modern SUVs and crossovers try to fit three rows of seats and up to eight passengers in package no larger than a Camry or Accord! For instance, a Volvo XC90 is only 189 inches long — two inches shorter than the tight five-passenger S80 sedan. In other words, this crossover SUV is actually five-inches shorter than an Accord, yet tries to fit seven passengers via a third row. The only way it does it is at the expense of front and rear leg room.

Furthermore, would you really feel safe putting your kids in a seat in the trunk of a Camry? That’s essentially what you do when driving most crossover and small SUVs!

Unfortunately, the only cars that seem to offer a sufficient amount of second seat legroom these days are the long wheelbase executive sedans, such as the BMW 750Li, Audi A8L, Mercedes S550, Hyundai Genesis, and Toyota Avalon. The BMW, Mercedes and Audi are all around $100,000, while the Hyundai is over $40K and Toyota over $30K. On the SUV side, there’s the Ford Expedition and Nissan Armada, but at $50,000 when optioned with Accord-level equipment, they represent the same quality-price-value proposition as dinner at Red Lobster.

Space management — it’s not just for studio apartments anymore!